


Play Nice

by Tozette



Series: Akatsuki AU Prompts [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Naruto
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Gore, Silly, Timeline What Timeline, i wasn't sure if mild gore was the right level of gore with which to tag this, so i just went with gore more generally but i feel like maybe that's too severe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-07-07 20:56:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19857913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: "It's an... unusual situation," Coulson said on their way to the elevator.Steve is confronted with two very strange strangers on the job, and he tries to play nice.





	Play Nice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PeinSaku](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeinSaku/gifts).



> Things you may need to know before beginning this fic: 
> 
> 1\. PeinSaku left me a prompt on [A Shark With Five Thousand A Year](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19765510) for "Stevie, America's Sweetheart (tm), trying to play nice and polite with My-Middle-Name-Is-Fuck-You Hidan", which is what this is... loosely... based on. 
> 
> 2\. I haven't seen most of the MCU films -- I saw Captain America (the first one) and The Avengers (the first one). This affects the characterisation of MCU characters! Sorry if I did a bad job, I guess.
> 
> 3\. This isn't edited. Hmm.

"It's an... unusual situation," Coulson said on their way to the elevator. It had to have been, Steve thought - SHIELD didn't really do 'usual', that wasn't their job. And anything that made Coulson pause like that must have been worse than just _unusual_.

"I can handle unusual," Steve said, cautious but confident. He was geared up, in the uniform he still couldn't help but think of as a costume, carrying his shield in one hand, loose by his side. There wasn't a lot he _couldn't_ handle. Which was lucky, because intel had been incredibly sparse so far.

Coulson gave him an odd, searching look and a half-smile that came from just the edge of his mouth. "I certainly hope so." And he pushed the button to the elevator at the end of the hall. It swooshed open immediately, as though it had been waiting for them right there on floor 32. They stepped in, Coulson hit LG12 - GARAGE, and the elevator descended silently. It was hard to tell how fast you were going with these modern ones.

"One of the reasons we haven't gathered the whole team today is that you won't be expected to engage in any combat -"

"You're sending me after a Hydra cell operating out of the United States, but you _don't_ want me to get involved in any combat?" Steve said, a little too sharply. "With all due respect," he began. His tone indicated that he felt that not much respect was in fact due.

"As you are aware," Coulson interrupted him before he could launch into the diatribe that seemed so imminent, "we at SHIELD monitor the presence of individuals with certain uncommon skills, and... people from elsewhere."

This, at least, made Steve pause. "'From elsewhere'," he said drily, after a beat. "From elsewhere like Loki?"

Coulson hummed. "Among others. Not every such person is interested in Earth on such a... scale. We don't usually have to intervene so overtly. But we know where they are, and we make contact with them intentionally. In some cases, expediency requires us to take advantage of the skills of those people already present on the ground at the time."

The lift came to a stop and the doors swooshed open the moment its interior settled, revealing a secure garage with bright overhead lights and broad, smooth concrete floors. There was a dark-painted, inconspicuous vehicle idling within. Its tinted windows gave the impression that it may or may not even have had a driver.

Steve stepped out of the lift but he turned back to Coulson.

"In this case your role is just to lend the legitimacy of Captain America and the Avengers to the operation, and to reassure any bystanders that the situation is progressing as expected under the control of the proper authorities."

He walked Steve to the car.

"And is it?" Steve wondered, following at a slower pace.

"Pardon?"

"Steve turned to Coulson, meeting his eyes with his jaw clenched tightly. He was more than capable of dealing with 'unusual' but he liked the sound of this less and less. People didn't tend to need 'reassurance' unless there was really something to be worried about, after all. " _Is_ it 'under the control of the proper authorities'?"

Coulson gave him a short, professional smile. It was impossible for Steve to tell if it reached his eyes or not.

"Of course," he said.

Steve watched him. He was clever, and he thought he was a pretty good judge of character, but he wasn't psychic - and Coulson was very hard to read.

Coulson opened a car door for Steve. "Kakuzu is the handler for the agent on the field. If you have any further questions about this operation, don't hesitate to ask him on the way.

You'd think there might be a greater security in knowing that even the car itself couldn't move Steve unless he allowed it to - but he knew they were short on time, and that whatever the situation was, it was undoubtedly worsening by the minute. He eyed Coulson, who watched him right back. He didn't look nervous. He didn't _sound_ nervous, either. No change in his breath, no soft creak of leather shoes as he shifted his weight.

In the end, Steve had to know if he trusted the guy handing out his missions. Did he?

There was a quiet, steady second that passed between them. The car's idle engine purred gently, and beneath even that Steve's acute senses picked up a soft _shh-shh_ sound from within, as though somebody was rapidly turning pages.

Against his own better judgement, Steve got in the car without hearing any further information. Coulson closed the door after him with a dull thump. The tint of the windows made everything outside seem dim and muted, and Coulson's face was even harder to read as he patted the car on the roof and backed away from it.

The driver, secret behind a partition - although, who knew, maybe it was some strange new technology driving this thing, and not a person at all - immediately began to take them out of the garage. The return of natural light a few moments later did not alter how dim it was in the car. SHIELD did really like its tinted windows.

Steve took a deep breath and turned toward the handler, who was sharing the back seat with him. He didn't look like traditional US military, but he didn't exactly scream 'SHIELD agent' to Steve, either. SHIELD Agents tended to have the homogenous look of people all absorbed in the same culture, and this guy definitely didn't have it. He was dark and above average in height, covered neck to ankles a long coat with some kind of dark wrapping on his head. He was counting money, crinkling the paper as he pushed aside the corner of each note, watching the process intently. His eyes were sharp and green, like faded dollar bills, and very, very bloodshot.

Steve's first thoughts were: _foreign,_ and _unfriendly,_ followed immediately by _is he sick?_

It wouldn't be strange for one of the 'people from elsewhere', as Coulson so euphemistically put it, to seem foreign - and Steve guessed that if he was anything as different as an Asgardian, all these other first thoughts could be completely wrong anyway.

He wasn't sure if he should interrupt the man's counting, but he actually _did_ have a couple of questions. Coulson's briefing, if you could call it that, hadn't exactly been detail heavy.

"Hi, I'm Steve," he said, aiming for friendly. Not 'Captain'. Kakuzu didn't strike Steve as much of a military man at all. A mercenary, maybe? Someone who didn't have to care about rank outside of his own tight and insular unit. "Kakuzu, right?"

The soft _shh-shh_ of the notes didn't stop. They seemed to have emerged from a huge dark case next to Kakuzu's foot on the floor, and when he was done with counting one pile, he'd... Steve wasn't completely sure. If the money was disappearing into Kakuzu's clothes, it was a lot of paper to hide beneath just the one huge dark coat.

Kakuzu grunted. "You have questions," he prompted, which Steve guessed meant he wasn't very interested in small talk. That was fine. They were both here to work, after all. He did his best not to feel offended.

"I do. So my job is to help out so people see me and feel safe about-" or _in spite of_ , he suspected "- the situation on the ground. It'd be a lot easier to do that if I knew what that situation looked like, going in."

Kakuzu grunted again but he seemed to consider it for a second. "All your enemy combatants will be dead, or on their way. Coulson expects more resistance - but he is seriously underestimating Hidan." A pause. Kakuzu glanced down at his case full of money and his eyes narrowed. Steve didn't think that was a good expression.

"Hidan's your ...agent? On site?" He used the word 'agent' loosely, but Kakuzu's expression - all eyebrows - still made him reconsider it.

"Partner," Kakuzu clarified laconically. Steve wasn't sure if he meant mission partner, business partner, life partner - and if they weren't from around here, it might be better not to assume anyway. "He'll have emptied the place out. _And_ left the bodies recognisable if he knows what's good for him," he added in a lower, more thoughtful voice. "They pay _me_ to make sure Hidan doesn't get too... over-enthusiastic. And they pay _you_ ," he added, very pointedly, "to make sure nobody gets hysterical about it." His hands did not pause in shuffling the paper bills.

Steve frowned. So much for the situation being under control. It sounded like Kakuzu was a lot more concerned by the damage his 'partner' might do than he was by Hydra - which didn't make sense. Steve knew Hydra. When bitten, they bit back.

"It _is_ a Hydra facility, isn't it?" he said, feeling unsettled and suspicious. Something wasn't right, but he didn't know what it was yet.

"That's what your leaders say," Kakuzu agreed, patently unconcerned with the idea that they might be involved in killing not a group of ancient, secretive and very dangerous active terrorists with strong Nazi ties, but just a random building full of misidentified citizens.

"You don't sound like you'd care very much," Steve said slowly, "if they weren't."

"All village leaders lie about the missions they send their soldiers on, and all leaders are corrupt to one degree or another," said Kakuzu. His hands paused their counting for a moment, and Steve saw a flash of what might have been a thick tattoo beneath the loose sleeve of his coat. "I care," he added, very clearly, meeting Steve's eyes steadily with his own dull green ones, "about getting paid."

Mercenary, then. Steve had been right. He didn't have a lot of personal experience working with them - a lot of the 'mercs' he'd known had just been American volunteers who'd volunteered abroad before the USA was actively engaged in combat. These days, he'd met a few more through SHIELD, but he'd never really worked with them.

"I don't believe that all leaders have to be corrupt," he said, uncomfortably, and the big, strange man snorted softly and went back to his rapid counting.

"They don't have to be," he agreed, "but they are."

Steve opened his mouth. "That wasn't -"

"Is there a point to this?" Kakuzu growled, cutting him off harshly.

He frowned severely. It didn't matter if Kakuzu didn't trust SHIELD - clearly he'd do whatever he had to because he was being paid for it. Coulson had been sure that it was Hydra, and Steve had already made the choice to trust his judgement at least far enough to get in the car.

"Well," said Steve, not happily, and leaned back in his seat. "I guess not."

Kakuzu would do his job, and Steve would do _his_ job, and he could ask Coulson for more information about Kakuzu later. And if Coulson wouldn't cough it up... well, he'd have to swallow his own pride a little, but Steve could always ask Stark. He didn't understand the man, and he wasn't sure he liked him, but he was willing to bet Tony Stark's curiosity and overwhelming ego would goad him into finding out all sorts of things if the challenge was presented in just the right way.

So Steve nodded to himself, let himself sink back against the dark-upholstered seats of the car, and assured himself that his questions could wait for answers. At least for a little while.

"The site is a building," said Kakuzu, after a moment, "a research facility, some kind of - chemist," he said, sounding for the first time less than certain when he said the word 'chemist'. Steve's mind, running a mile a minute, filed that away for later. "A laboratory for research," he clarified, which was ground that sounded much firmer. Odd. "It's in a crowded area."

Of course it was.

Steve nodded. "Do you know anything about the numbers, or..."

"It won't matter," said Kakuzu.

Steve felt his eyebrows rise, possibly all the way off his face. "It won't matter," he repeated.

"Like I said," said Kakuzu, "they've underestimated Hidan."

And with that ominous statement, he fell silent.

Was this 'Hidan' like the Hulk, then? Steve wondered. He did sound a bit that way - and Steve could imagine himself saying something similar about the Hulk. Numbers tended to matter a lot less than armament, in the face of that kind of power. He considered asking for clarification, but Kakuzu didn't exactly go out of his way to invite conversation.

Steve hadn't met many people _less_ inviting than Kakuzu, actually.

He lifted his head at about the same time as the vague noises of the road around them started to be mixed with noises he knew intimately and didn't like - voices yelling, swearing. There was the ugly shriek of metal scraping against metal somewhere up ahead.

As they sped closer to the sounds, outside the window, most of the people he could see were peering unhappily out through the doors and windows of stores, looking unsettled but confused. That was pretty common for people on the peripheral of a SHIELD operation - if you didn't know what was going on, you tended not to know enough to be scared. At least until someone wrote it on that Twitter thing, anyway.

Another block, and Steve swore quietly. He could _smell_ the blood. In the middle of the city, from the back seat of a car? Even with his heightened senses, that was _very bad news._

"Where are the police?" he muttered, because he hadn't seen a perimeter yet. They might not have been able to deal with Hydra on their own, but the local police should have been involved in containing the situation.

Kakuzu didn't bother to answer. He finished counting his latest pile of bills, disappeared it somewhere that Steve couldn't actually see, and then leaned down to zip up his bag.

And then the car pulled up, and Steve quickly stepped out. Outside was kind of chaos, but he was used to chaos.

There had definitely been some kind of fight, and a serious one at that. The concrete had been ripped up in places and the bitumen had cracked. There was water trickling down the gutters, too much of it to be accounted for by recent rain, so some kind of pipe had clearly been broken somewhere. The air was thinly tainted with dust and smoke, and through all of that, Steve could still smell the damn blood.

It was largely deserted - _most_ people had clearly evacuated themselves when no immediate evacuation had been sounded by anyone in authority. But there was at least one guy in his car not five car-lengths away. Steve's ears, enhanced by the serum, could hear him, and he glanced over his shoulder to look. The man wasn't going anywhere, but he was clutching the steering wheel and trying to breathe. He was sure there'd be other people - probably people _not_ hiding sensibly, too.

Once he'd stepped away from the car, Steve was able to look up properly - and up.

"What... is that," he said, so flat it wasn't even a question in his mouth anymore.

It was easy to tell which building was host to their Hydra offshoot, not because it was smoking from one corner - although it was - but because it had been decorated with a huge. red, circular design. The part of Steve that had grown up as a good, god-fearing boy in the early 20th century recoiled instinctively, but the rest of him wasn't far behind.

The building was twenty or more stories, and the design was enormous. It was bright, bright red, but in places it was dripping and in places it was already drying brown. He was pretty sure he'd just found what he could smell on the wind.

Was that some new Hydra tactic? Some kind of grotesque sacrificial ritual? Or just intimidation?

His stomach gave an unsettled shiver. That was more than one person's blood.

"Hidan," said Kakuzu, getting out the other side and calmly staring over the car's hood. "That's Hidan."

Somewhere Steve couldn't see, amid the broken concrete and exposed rebar and smoke, someone gave a throaty, gleeful whoop. Incongruously, a scream echoed it.

"Like I said," said Kakuzu, tossing his coat into the back seat of the car and rolling his neck. His clothes beneath the coat bared his arms and his shoulders, and they were crosscrossed with marks and corded with heavy muscle. Some of those were definitely tattoos. The others were scars. Bad ones. "He's enthusiastic."

He then bit his thumb and marked the hood of the car in his own blood. "It will go badly for you, if anything happens to my things," he said aloud, presumably for the benefit of the driver. He shut the car door with a thump.

Steve looked back at the huge, bloody marking on the building. That was _their_ guy? Coulson had lied, this was the _opposite_ of 'under control'. "Is that..."

"Ugh. Stop wasting time," said Kakuzu, and then he did not wait for Steve to respond before striding away.

Steve knew that his role here was technically not to investigate anything at all - he was just there to make the whole situation look marginally more legitimate to 'bystanders', by which he now suspected SHIELD meant 'any hovering news crews'. But he followed Kakuzu in anyway. He wanted to know what was going on.

Inside the broken building, it was devoid of actual life, but there were plenty of bodies. From the inside, the building itself was so obviously the home of a Hydra affiliated organisation that it was actually a little comforting - there were red and black Hydra symbols on the walls and all the bodies were fully kitted out in the kind of standard Hydra gear that Steve had seen in hundreds of after-action reports on the SHIELD servers. It wasn't identical to the uniforms they'd had in the 40s, but it had similarities.

He rolled one body over and found both his door pass to the building and his personal ID. It was a little disappointing to find that Cody Everett, with his New York divers' license, was Hydra... but there was no reason to suspect that anybody was misleading them about the situation in general: the building had clearly been full of heavily-armed members of Hydra, the annotated print outs on someone's abandoned desk said they were involved in both chemical weapons testing and in regular, brutal office politics.

"There'll be time for taking their wallets later," Kakuzu said, and Steve blinked away from Everett's license. The silence in the building was sort of eerie, actually - there were plenty of dead Hydra agents, but not sounds of life. Even the whooping laughter from earlier had fallen silent at some point.

Usually when he attended a 'situation' Steve was prepared for getting shot at. This was just... empty. And quiet. He kind of wished it wasn't just him and Kakuzu and the dead. Even aside from all the blood and dead people, something didn't feel quite right. He just didn't know what it was, yet.

He put Everett's license back in his wallet and his wallet back in his pocket, then patted the dead man's chest gently before he straightened up. His boots crunched in the broken glass underfoot.

"The wounds on these agents are strange," he said, nodding to the body.

They weren't from bullets - not even hollow points caused this broad a pattern of damage in this way. Steve had seen plenty of people get shot and blown up, so he was pretty sure the holes in this guy were from bladed weapons. That wasn't so strange given that 'people from elsewhere' had been big fans of swords and daggers and war hammers so far, in Steve's experience of them. But it _was_ weird how... sharp and... _deliberate..._ they were. He'd seen knife fights: they left short, ugly, deep wounds with ragged edges, because once you stabbed someone you didn't stop to make sure the cut was perfect - you jerked and yanked to make it as messy and lethal as you could. "They're very..." He wasn't sure quite what word to use. "Neat?"

Kakuzu made a short, barking noise. Steve wasn't sure if that was laughter. "Neat," he repeated, derisively. Whatever had prompted this scorn, Steve didn't get to hear, because he shook his head and continued walking.

Steve followed him, on the assumption that he certainly seemed to know where his partner was, even if there was no evidence that they'd communicated. The corridor was a reeking, ghastly scene, but nobody in it was alive to care, other than the pair of them. And of the pair of them, Steve felt like he was the only one who even noticed. The way the bodies were sprawled out in every room he passed didn't quite _fit_ correctly with what he expected, although if you asked him how he would not have been able to say. Even aside from the strange series of bloody circles decorating the floors, there was something subtly unsettling-- like these bodies, somehow, they hadn't fought quite right. He stopped before asking if the bodies had been moved - they clearly hadn't been. The blood stains proved it.

The finally came to a stop outside a room labelled 'secure laboratory - safety equipment required'. The heavily reinforced metal doors had a glowing red light lit above them: 'Quarantine'.

And below that, in front of the doors, another corpse lay arranged curiously in a circle of sticky, drying blood -

"I should have guessed," said Kakuzu, stomping over to boot it in the thigh. His boots, Steve noticed, had no toes. That seemed... odd. "Are you going to waste time with this all afternoon?"

The man laying spread out on the floor before the doors had to be the mysterious Hidan, from Kakuzu's comments, but he didn't look like any kind of soldier - or even any kind of combatant - at all. For one, he was bare from the waist up, and not armoured otherwise. For another, Steve was pretty sure he was _already dead_. He was paler than half the bodies Steve had seen here, and, importantly, there was a spear jammed right through his chest. His ribs had to have snapped to accommodate it, and there was blood welling darkly around the wound.

Steve looked uncertainly over at Kakuzu. Had he somehow not noticed?

"It's a _prayer_ , you ungrateful bastard," said the body, without opening his eyes, without even sounding obstructed by the spear in his chest.

_Shit._

Steve could not quite contain his flinch.

Thor, and even Loki, were hardy, and could throw off injuries that would incapacitate another human, but a spear right through the chest would kill an Asgardian just like anyone else. Even the Hulk, nigh-invincible as he was, felt pain and injury when he was attacked. Steve wasn't sure what a spear through the chest would do to him, but he was sure the big guy would be unhappy about it. Hidan, on the other hand, didn't seem to be inconvenienced by his at all.

Kakuzu kicked him again. "Hidan," he barked.

"Hey! Ow, ouch. Watch where you're kicking! Shit. That _hurts_ , you know," complained the guy with the spear, but all he actually _did_ was stretch and sigh luxuriously.

Then Steve watched him reach up and wrench the spear right out of his own chest. The meaty, sucking sound made it immediately clear that it was no illusion.

Steve thought about the bullet holes decorating the interior walls. Yeah, this guy wouldn't have been troubled by bullets. Would probably, he thought, not be troubled by very much at all.

"Lucky for you I was nearly done." Hidan went on stretching in the tacky mess on the floor. The blood was drying on his face and his chest and in his hair. He was clearly not bothered by it. He rolled over and wiped a streak of blood off his mouth with the back of one moon-white hand, before setting his eyes on Steve.

"How about you, huh?" He waved the spear one-handed, way too effortlessly for a guy who still had the hole in his chest from where it had been lodged. "You look like a nice guy. Prayers for the dead are important, right?"

Steve felt his eyebrows rise. Was that what this was meant to be? Some kind of respect for the dead? The most off-putting, unsettling thing about the situation was how _normally_ the man treated it. Most religions seemed to take death and murder just as seriously as the religion Steve had known when he went to church on Sundays as a boy. He felt poorly-equipped to be asked that question at spear-point, though. SHIELD's short-but-mandatory sensitivity training had absolutely not prepared him for this.

"Sure," he said slowly, erring on the side of not offending someone he'd evidently have to work with, "religious freedom is... important." Probably. He guessed. He felt like that was a safe answer on all fronts, anyway, although it was hard to say if that extended to lengthy prayers on a battlefield. Maybe the dangers of that practice were less of an issue for a man who could shrug off stab wounds.

"That's right!" said Hidan, surging to his feet.

Steve took a wary step back, but the spear tip did not even tremble with the movement. Hidan had perfect control over it. The blood was still leaking from his chest, and Steve got a glance at the inner walls of the wound, fresh and red, as he moved and the muscles tried to contract. Hidan swung the spear up and over his shoulder and stepped in close enough that Steve could see the blood stuck around the grooves of his teeth. He raised his eyes to Hidan's. 

"This is America!" Hidan laughed like a broken hinge. "Every man's got a right, right?"

Steve met his eyes steadily, although his fist was so tight around the strap of his shield that he could hear his glove creaking gently.

"Are there more Hydra agents in the quarantined laboratory?" he asked, mildly and levelly.

His heart, artificially enhanced and reliable as the sunrise, beat easy and steady beneath his ribs, implacably, like a metronome.

Hidan stared at him.

It was a long, still moment between them and Steve really thought for a second that Hidan was going to snap and go for his throat - maybe with his teeth. His eyes were pale pink and glassy, fevered to look at and there was a fine trembling in his shoulders that Steve read more as excitement than exhaustion or fear. Then, too, there was the horrible, rising potential for violence, hot in the air, like a real and living thing growing to suffocate all three of them.

Instead of trying to murder him, Hidan smiled at him: a cracked, bloody, ugly smile. It was somehow even worse for how much _joy_ it communicated. 

"Heh. It's not often you meet someone here who can stand up in front of my killing intent... I like you," he decided, smacking Steve's shield with the pole of his spear. It clanged loudly. Then he turned his whole body towards the doors, which was something of a relief. "Yeah, there's a bunch of them in there. Scared little heathens, holed up like rats on a sinking ship. They've got some kind of poison smoke pellets or something, but I wasn't really paying attention. Not like it makes a difference, ne, Kakuzu?"

He flicked his febrile, glazed eyes toward Kakuzu, whose head tilted sideways speculatively for a second. "One day," he predicted, without much inflection at all, "you really will find something that can kill you."

Hidan leaned on his spear. "Don't make me _laugh,_ " he sneered.

Kakuzu grunted something that may or may not have constituted an argument, and then he took three determined steps forward and grabbed the doors. They refused to budge, because they were blast doors - they were meant to stand against explosions.

Kakuzu's skin changed colour then, ashy grey where it had been warm brown, and the heavy ropes of muscle rippled across his big shoulders. He drew back one arm, clenched his big hand into a fist, and punched the door.

The strike connected with a terrible sound. The metal dented. Kakuzu's face didn't change. He pulled back and punched again. Steve heard the hiss of the seal breaking. Another punch finally buckled the steel, and Kakuzu was able to get his fingers around the edges and find purchase on the door.

With a low, effortful grunt, and the sudden agonised squeal of tearing metal, he ripped one of the doors right out of its fixtures.

Steve clenched his jaw. The sheer strength that required was... unexpected. He'd known Kakuzu was strong just looking at him, but he'd thought he was regular, human strong. Steve might have been able to do that -- on a good day, and depending on the door. The Hulk could, certainly. Thor, probably. Iron Man, probably. Some of the X-Men, perhaps. He breathed out, slowly, fighting the alarm that was building in his guts.

Kakuzu's breath came out in a hard pant of air as he tossed it away, narrowly missing Hidan with the inches-thick slab of metal. It crashed behind them, and Kakuzu's powerful shoulders slumped for a second. It had, Steve assessed, at least taken him a serious effort.

"Yes!" Hidan bounded forward with a delighted whoop of enthusiasm, ignoring that there seemed to be a heavy, green-tinged cloud of musty-smelling gasses right beyond the opening. Steve, however, wrinkled his nose. He was pretty sure he'd seen posters about things that smelled like that, back in his childhood. He noticed that Kakuzu, too, stood warily back from the fumes.

"I'd be careful," said Kakuzu to him then, ignoring the sudden onset of loud, scared shouting - and, yes, there it was, gunfire - from inside the laboratory. He rolled out his shoulders and cracked his neck. "First it's 'I like you', and then it's 'join me in the agony of eternal suffering and know god'."

He sounded, to Steve, as though he was speaking from experience. He wondered if that was what Kakuzu meant by 'partners'. 

Steve took a firmer grip on the strap of his shield. He regretted, already, not asking more questions of Coulson. He had a lot of them for him when he returned. He glanced back at the broken metal of the door, and then eyed Kakuzu. A handler, Coulson had said. He hadn't said that he'd be able to rip reinforced blast doors off their hinges with almost no effort. Steve wasn't feeling very friendly toward his own handler right now. Some of the questions he had for Coulson would be quite pointed, he thought. 

But for now, Steve prepared to enter the laboratory.

"REPENT, HEATHENS," screeched Hidan from within, at a pitch that vibrated in the floors. Kakuzu did not so much as blink.

...Steve prepared to enter the laboratory, and he wasn't sure which side he'd be fighting on when he got in there.

**Author's Note:**

> End notes: 
> 
> 1\. We stopped here because once Steve actually sees Hidan in action I feel like it would be stretching the bounds of his characterisation if he _didn't_ intervene. Steve's all for killing Hydra goons at need, I think, but I don't think he's ready to stand by there and let Hidan gleefully sacrifice them to the god of suffering.
> 
> 2\. Maybe obviously, Kakuzu and Hidan are not actually SHIELD agents, even though Coulson implies it to Steve. Hidan is... Hidan, and Kakuzu is the consultant that SHIELD pays to point him at someone else. Unfortunately, he's the only one qualified. ("What a shame for them," says Kakuzu, licking one thumb so he can page faster through his money.)
> 
> 3\. I feel strongly that this fic embraces the trope, for better or for ill, where crossovers occur just so some characters can stand around gawping at other characters. I feel vindicated in doing this, however, because _this happens to Hidan and Kakuzu in Naruto canon anyway_. They're just that extra. 
> 
> 4\. Writing this, I learnt that US money _is_ paper, but is made somehow from cotton rather than traditional wood sources. ~~As an Australian, I am confused by money that isn't colour coded and printed in different sizes, anyway. Excuse me, sir, if it's green it must be a $100 note --~~
> 
> 4\. Anyway, if you enjoyed some part of this silly fic, please feel free to drop me a comment and let me know about it (if you are inclined to comment). (And, if you feel like you also have a ridiculous Akatsuki AU that you want to give me a prompt for, you're also welcome to leave one for me.)


End file.
